Ngasundiera Naxin: A Fragment of the Cosmos
November 9–December 15, 2024
Opening Reception Saturday, Nov 9, 5-8 PM
Transmitter is proud to present Ngasundiera Naxin: A Fragment of the Cosmos, a selection of large-scale mural paintings by Filogonio Naxín. Naxín is an artist, teacher, and culture bearer. He is profoundly committed to the engagement and diffusion of Mazateca Indigenous culture and stories from Oaxaca, Mexico. His aesthetic interests have developed a visual language of motifs, words, and line work that form landscapes of imagined settings to contemporary stories, oral histories, and mythologies. In this series of works, the color blue resonates in all its hues, creating depth of cobalt, azure, marine, sky, and a wellspring of colors.
In each painting, various living forms, such as animals and human creatures, take center stage to tell their story. Naxín introduces speech bubbles in his first language, Mazateco, followed by a visual language of stars, houses, skyscrapers, mushrooms, and corn. From a Mazatec cosmological understanding of time and history, creation stories consider the duality of fundamentals that coexist because each other exists, for example, day and night, material and immaterial. Naxín takes liberties in color and scale that portray and ensure that his Indigenous existence overwhelms and enriches an urbanized world. His figures emerge as line gestures and repeated motifs, like the cityscapes, alongside familial Indigenous stories like the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and the rabbit and the moon.
Most notably, Naxín illustrates personal symbolism like the straw hat, the house where he grew up, and the animals in the area representing his roots in the Sierra Mazateca. The animals are playful, with elongated necks as they grow towards the sky and stretch out on the earth. He places the deer, a sacred animal in the Mazateca cosmology, and the opossums that relate stories of tricks, as well as armadillos and dogs. Referring to nagual, animal-humans that guide spiritual growth and transformation, many times explain the natural world –the patterns and changes that Naxín heard in the stories shared in his community. The colors and nebulous stars permeate all beings, connecting the same molecular energy through animals, human-like outlines, shadows, mountains, and sky. Without differentiation, all living beings are represented and held together in blue. Naxin captures an important aspect of Mazateca cosmology of unity that can be interpreted, imagined, and reimagined to consider the past, present, and future.
–Eva Mayhabal Davis, Curator
Thank you for the generous support from Visible Records, Charlottesville, VA, friends, and family, making this exhibition possible. A catalog will be published, including a text by Diana Iturralde, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
About the artist:
Filogonio Naxín (b.1986 Mazatlán Villa de Flores, Oaxaca, Mexico) works in various media such as painting, works on paper, drawing, engravings, and illustration. He is a prominent advocate of Indigenous cultures and a speaker of the Mazateca language. In 2012, he graduated from the Autonomous University Benito Juárez of Oaxaca with a BA in Fine Arts. He has exhibited widely across Mexico, including at the National Museum of Anthropology, the Los Pinos Cultural Complex, the Colegio de San Ildefonso, the National Museum of World Cultures of the INAH, the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca-IAGO, the National Museum of Popular Cultures, the National Museum of the Stamp. His work has been exhibited abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, Chicago, Virginia, and New York, USA. In March 2024, his work entered the permanent National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico (CDMX) collection in the ethnography wing titled “Fiestas y textiles.”